The Fremont National Forest is situated near the geographical center
of the West Coast's ponderosa pine timber belt. The pine lands of
northern California stretch to the south of the Fremont, and to the
north stretch the pine forests of Oregon's and Washington's Cascade
Mountains. The inland portions of Oregon and Washington and the Rocky
Mountain states contain additional ponderosa lands, of course, but the
"pine belt" of the eastern Cascades once offered a continuous stand of
mature timber covering thousands of square miles from central California
to the Canadian border.

Captain John C. Fremont

The pine belt has figured into national history in several ways. In
1910, The Timberman magazine commented that the "timber belt of
[West Coast pine]...constitutes the greatest body of standing pine
timber now existing in America." The development of this immense
resource involved some of the largest and most powerful industrial firms
in the United States, including the Southern Pacific and Northern
Pacific railways, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, the Long-Bell Lumber
Company, Minnesota's Shevlin associates, and other lumber
manufacturers.

The western pine industry began after the western fir and redwood
industries had gotten their starts during the middle decades of the
Nineteenth Century. Because the pine forests of the western states were
located in inland areas out of the reach of navigable waters, the
industry developed only after the transcontinental railroads made
distant markets accessible. For central Oregon, rail transport was not
available until the second decade of the Twentieth Century.

The development of the western pine industry was also influenced by
the re-location of the lake states pine mills. Many of the pine lumber
companies which had grown up in the Great Lakes region found themselves
running short of timber as the Nineteenth Century drew to a close. While
some of the lake states operators re-located in the fir-producing
portions of the western states, the pine areas exercised a special
attraction to others. The pine regions were less developed than the fir
or redwood regions and the stumpage prices were correspondingly lower.
Also, logging conditions in the western pine forests were closer to
those prevailing in the midwestern forests. The trees were similar in
size and stand density, the terrain was gentler than the coastal
mountains, and the climate  with its cold winters and dry summers
 offered an easier transition than the coastal rain forests.

The result was that large and well-financed midwestern firms like the
Red River Lumber Company, Shevlin-Hixon, and Weyerhaeuser began buying
extensive tracts of pine timber during the 1890s and the years after the
turn of the century.

Oregon's Lake County  which contains much of the Fremont
National Forest  attracted its share of this speculative attention
during the 1890s and 1900s. Tracts of timber land were acquired from the
Public Domain in Lake County (as elsewhere in the west) by expedients
that skirted or openly flouted the law. Abuses of this kind led to the
formation of the National Forest Reserve system and the protection of
the Fremont lands.

The advent of railroads offers a convenient line of demarcation
between pre-industrial lumbering in pine areas and full-blown industrial
production.

Before railroads, lumber was manufactured on demand for local
consumption; there was simply no way to get the product out of the
country. After the railroad came, however, lumber could be cut steadily
and sold to consumers as far away as the east coast. To offer a
comparison between pre-industrial production and industrial production,
we might consider the example provided by the Red River Lumber Company
mill in Westwood, California. A pre-industrial water-powered sash mill
such as those located in Lake or Klamath Counties might cut 100,000
board feet of lumber each year. The Red River mill  admittedly the
largest western pine mill  at the peak of its production cut
800,000 board feet during an eight-hour shift.

In 1909, a branch of the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Klamath
Falls, Oregon; in 1912, the narrow-gauge Nevada-California-Oregon
railroad reached Lakeview; and in 1911, a branch of the Great Northern
reached Bend, Oregon. The lumber companies followed the railroads to
Bend and Klamath Falls within a year or two, and these towns were well
on their way to becoming national centers of pine production by the time
of World War I.

For Lakeview, however, the long-awaited railroad was a rather cruel
joke. As a narrow-gauge line, the N-C-O used equipment that was
incompatible with that of the broad-gauge lines. The result of this
technological quirk was that lumber loaded into boxcars at Lakeview had
to be unloaded and reloaded into broad-gauge cars at Alturas or Reno,
where the N-C-O joined the national rail network. Since lumber was
manufactured and sold on very narrow profit margins, mills located in
Lakeview could not compete with mills located elsewhere. The extra
handling and transportation costs were simply too much. As a result,
Lakeview remained in a semi-industrialized state until 1928, when the
Southern Pacific bought the N-C-O and converted it to broad-gauge
track.

One part of the history of the Fremont National Forest is the story
of American industrial development, but another part is the story of
Lake County and the social and cultural development of one of America's
last frontiers.

Euro-American settlement in the Goose Lake Valley did not really
begin until the 1870s, well after most of the west was settled or at
least settling. The ranchers and itinerant stockmen who first came to
Lake County formed the community of Lakeview to wrest political power
away from the rival community of Klamath Falls (then Linkville) located
100 miles to the west.

By 1880 Lakeview had a population of 270. Development proceeded
steadily during the 1880s, and Lakeview was incorporated at the end of
the decade. During the 1890s, Lakeview continued its pattern of slow
growth as a service and retail center for the ranches of south central
Oregon. Lakeview's isolation from the rest of Oregon became more
pronounced as railroad and telegraph service connected other Oregon
towns together. In his Illustrated History of Central Oregon,
(1905), A.B. Shaver comments that Lakeview's location 150 miles from the
nearest railroad gave the little town the "distinction...of being the
farthest from a railroad of any county seat town in the United
States."

The vast open ranges of Lake County attracted stockmen from
throughout the western states and from Europe. Cattle and sheep ranches
prospered. After the formation of the National Forest system from the
Forest Reserves in 1905, the administration of grazing on forest
grasslands became the central chore of the newly appointed Fremont
staff.

Ethnic groups associated with the Lake County livestock business
included the Irish and  to a lesser extent  the Basques.
Both of the groups were involved in sheep raising. The Lake County Irish
came from County Cork and other counties of western Ireland. In his
leisurely and well-detailed account of the County Cork-Lakeview
connection, From Shamrocks to Sagebrush, Robert Barry presents
Lakeview as a comfortable, somewhat circumscribed community during the
1920s. Neighbors and relatives in the old country carried on their lives
in the new country with a minimum of concern about the outside world.
The most famous of all Lakeview Irish jokes makes this point very well.
A Lakeview sheepherder from County Cork wired his nephew money for
passage across the Atlantic and sent some avuncular advice to go with
it: "Mikey, my boy, come straight to Lakeview; don't bother stopping in
America at all."

On January 5, 1920, Dr. Bernard Daly, who was Lakeview's most
prominent citizen, died en route to San Francisco. The town that Daly
and his generation had built was essentially a market town for the
ranches of the south central Oregon valleys. During the World War I
years, the desert country of northern Lake County had filled with
homesteaders, who added to the population base that Lakeview served.

Later in 1920, shortly after Dr. Daly's death, two "modern" lumber
companies were incorporated in Lakeview. These were the Underwood Lumber
Company, and the Lakeview Lumber and Box Company. All incorporators
listed Lakeview as their residence. Still later in the same year, a
"large Eastern firm," the Pennsylvania Door and Sash company, began
purchasing timber land on Cottonwood Creek and acquired a mill site in
Lakeview.

To the local journalists, this flurry of activity signaled Lakeview's
coming of age. The new mills were committed to selling Lake County
products throughout the nation. Both lumber companies were contemplating
box factories, which had been the force behind Klamath Falls' rise to
industrial prominence. The Pennsylvania Door and Sash company was an
especially exciting venture since it was to be a remanufacturing plant.
In operation, it would purchase lumber from local sawmills and
manufacture the material into architectural components. The factory
would give the county's lumber mills a local market for their product,
and add value to that product before it was shipped off to national
markets. So eager were the Lake County businessmen for the new ventures
that they "subscribed" a sum of $3000.00 to buy the Pennsylvania company
a mill site on the town's round-up grounds. The rich symbolism of
selling the town's round-up grounds to provide a place for the new
industry was too clear to be missed: livestock had shaped Lakeview's
past, but timber would shape its future.

The 1920-1922 period was slow for the lumber business everywhere in
the West. The nation was still absorbing the capacity that had built up
to serve the World War I market and prices were off.

Lakeview's problems, however, had more to do with local concerns than
with the regional picture. When the ailing N-C-O railroad tried to
abandon its line in 1921, local residents perceived that the loss of a
railroad would mean the end of the lumber business. Local feelings ran
high when the Interstate Commerce Commission met to decide the matter.
While their decision was fortunate for Lakeview, the whole episode did
little to inspire confidence.

With the development of the lumber industry after 1920, Lakeview
gradually changed from a market and livestock town to a mill town.
Industry replaced commerce as a dominant economic force in the town.
During the early years of the 1920s, the Lake County homesteaders began
to "starve out" on their precarious desert claims. Many of these people
migrated to Lakeview  as well as Klamath Falls and Bend  to
join the pool of industrial labor.

Later, during the 1930s, the livestock business fell ill during the
depression and died when the Taylor Grazing Act closed the open range.
Stockmen, cowboys, and sheepherders looked for jobs in town.

Probably because of its narrow-gauge railroad service, Lakeview
failed to attract the large national lumber firms that dominated the
economies of other central Oregon towns. Such giants of the industry as
Weyerhaeuser, Brooks-Scanlon, Long-Bell, and Shevlin-Hixon owned timber
in Lake County, but they did not build mills in Lakeview. Corporate
records filed with the Oregon Department of Commerce reveal that the
firms that did build mills in Lakeview were financed locally, or at
least with local partners. The net effect was that as Lakeview
industrialized during the 1920s, it participated less in the "colonial
economy" of the lumber industry than other central Oregon communities
did. This is not to imply that all of the wealth extracted from nearby
forests remained in Lakeview, but the slow, small-scale development of
the lumber industry encouraged local participation and fostered economic
health.

After 1928, lumber manufacturing began in earnest in Lakeview.
Several new mills were built and the tempo of logging on private as well
as public lands increased. In 1929, two of the largest Klamath Falls
mills  Ewauna Box Company and Pelican Bay Lumber Company 
began cutting timber near Fremont lands. The Oregon, California &
Eastern railroad had been extended from Sprague River to Bly, and the
long haul (80 miles) back to Klamath Falls presented no real
problem.

In the economic and social chaos which followed 1929, Lakeview fared
better than most lumber-dependent communities. Mills ran  at least
sporadically  during the darkest years, and the industry began to
show some real signs of life by 1933. By the fall of 1930, it had become
apparent that the economy would not bounce back easily or quickly. Lake
County production was off 35% from the previous year. Production revived
slightly in the fall of 1930, with 90 carloads of lumber and 16 carloads
of shook shipped out in November. The following year brought an increase
in production to the 30 million board feet level and a new roster of
mills. The 1933 season saw Crane Creek Lumber Company's Fandango mill
open after a year's recess, and a new mill  the Buzard Lumber
Company  open in the fall.

During the 1933 season, eleven Lake County mills cut 55 million board
feet of lumber, a new record. Both the Timberman and the
Examiner estimated the total number of workers employed by the
industry at 800  an encouraging number of jobs in a generally
discouraging year.

By 1935, The Timberman was predicting the Lakeview district
cut 75 to 80 million board feet. Lakeview had six large mills:
Buzard-Burkhart Lumber Company, Underwood Lumber Company, the R.S. Adams
mill, two DeArmond mills, and the Crooked Creek Lumber Company mill.
Smaller mills included the A.L Edgerton mill, the Fields and Wilhelm
mill, the Lake County Pine Lumber Company mill, and the Rohr Lumber
Company mill. By the end of the 1935 season, all the Lake County mills
were running, C.W. Woodcock planned to build a new mill in Lakeview, and
the Lakeview Sash and Door Company was remanufacturing local lumber for
shipment east. Total production for the year actually exceeded 80
million feet.

By the late 1930's, Bend's largest mill  Shevlin-Hixon 
was preparing to cut timber in northern Lake County that it had
purchased over thirty years before. In 1938, the Gilchrist Timber
Company built a mill at Gilchrist, Oregon, to cut timber that they had
purchased during the same speculative frenzy at the turn of the century.
Finally, at the end of the 1930s, Weyerhaeuser began construction of its
East Block railroad, an ambitious and nearly anachronistic project that
would enable it to reach its timber holdings in western Lake County.
Although Shevlin-Hixon, Gilchrist, and Weyerhaeuser cut their own
timber, they also purchased Fremont National Forest sales, and they
exchanged their cut-over lands into public ownership.

During the last four years of the decade, the potential that Lake
County had offered for so long seemed closer than ever. Production edged
toward 100 million board feet/year. The operating season lengthened, the
work force stabilized, and entrepreneurs began new ventures with new
confidence. Both mill workers and loggers were unionized by 1941.
Lakeview presented a new industrial face. In July, 1936, The
Timberman editor commented that "less than two decades ago" the talk
in Lakeview was exclusively "beef cattle, range, and cow hands." All
that had changed, and the cowboys had now "replaced their high-heeled
boots and spurs with the spiked boots of the logger."

"When nearing Lakeview from the west, ... [lumber] plants make up a
picture of well-founded industry. With the Southern Pacific tracks
replacing the old narrow gauge road long trains of lumber products are
seen going from these hills. Add to this the many logging trucks
entering the city, [and] a ten-year absentee would hardly recognize the
place."

In an similarly reflective article written in 1942, the West Coast
Lumberman remarked on Lakeview's change.

"There are seven mills in or close to Lakeview. These start at one
edge of town (where the railroad makes its entry) and follow along to
the far end of town, making it a regular 'sawmill row' from one end of
the city to another."

In summary, then, Lakeview's development during the 1871-1939 period
includes two distinct phases. During the 1885-1928 period, Lakeview
served the livestock industry of south central Oregon as a commercial
center. The town provided goods and services for a market area of
perhaps 20,000 square miles in south central Oregon and north eastern
California. Beginning with the construction of a broad gauge railroad in
1928, Lakeview changed from a commercial town to an industrial town
containing up to ten lumber mills and remanufacturing plants. As
livestock declined during the 1930s, industry made a more substantial
contribution to the local economy.

The effects of these historical patterns on the Fremont National
Forest are clear in Bach's History. For the first three decades
of its existence, the Fremont provided range and watershed for the
livestock industry. Timber was not a management issue, since there were
no timber sales of any consequence. Then, after 1928, when the broad
gauge railroad reached Lakeview, the rich ponderosa stands began to
attract outside attention. The Fremont's years of isolation drew to a
close.

The pace of timber production on the Fremont grew through the 1930s
until 1943, when it sold more logs than any other National Forest in the
Pacific Northwest Region. The Fremont's production during this year
exceeded even the coastal rainforests'. Record levels of production
cannot be sustained in the slow-growing ponderosa forests, however, and
the cutting rate has since slowed to a more reasonable level.

The history of the Fremont National Forest is intimately bound up
with the development of south central Oregon. As the region has changed,
the Forest's administrative and management policies have reflected those
changes.